Help with ideas for writing a pokemon themed tabletop rpg campaign

Hello everyone,

I am going to be running a pokemon themed dnd campaign soon and am still struggling with some ideas. I have created my own region around darkrai and cresselia but am stuck on a name for the region. I was thinking calling it Celestia but am unsure. I also am stuck on a name for my evil team and would love some suggestions. I've got some good plot points with the whole campaign being about the balance of light and darkness in the region and my evil team is upsetting the balance causing shadow pokemon to pop up in the wild. I just wanted to see if anyone had any good ideas to help me flesh this out. I'm making up all the rules and mechanics as i go along.


I do apologize if i am posting this in the wrong place.

Oh, a Pokemon DnD campaign sounds fun! Tbh I'm bad with names for worldbuilding, but I think you can use Celestia as a placeholder for now.

As for the evil team, what is their ultimate goal? You mentioned them using shadow Pokemon, is there a motive for that besides disrupting the balance between light and darkness?

One of my big plot points is how Darkrai and Cresselia are slumbering in different parts of the region hidden away to keep the balance. My idea was for the leader of my evil team to want to cover the region in darkness and take control of this region and then move on to take over all the other regions, they have managed to find and remove Cresselia from the ancient ruins thus causing the shift in the balance.

Purely from a narrative point of view:

So, the plan is to disrupt the natural order so that friendly creatures present everywhere start turning into unstoppable red-eyed monstrosities. Nice, it has potential as an evil scheme. Do your villains have a means of controlling the Shadow Pokémon as an evil army?

They do. My evil team has developed basically control collars. They capture/steal a pokemon and fit the collar to them, that collar then releases the darker natures of the pokemon powering them up and giving them control over them. They will also slowly start releasing/tagging wild pokemon to help cause chaos later on.

Okay. I'm guessing that the collars are the test stage of the true plan, not usable for true mass destruction, but good for isolated attacks. Also, the evil team members have some nifty collar-controlling remote gadget as part of their uniforms, right? Haha!

How exactly does the unbalancing of the Darkrai/Cresselia system affect the world? Do Pokémon start turning Shadow by themselves all over the place to apocalyptic imagery? In that case, does the evil team have, for instance, a satellite-like version of the collar technology to control the rampaging hordes? Or does the balance disruption just make it easier for the evil team to turn Pokémon into Shadow Pokémon under their control (think change of air pressure), say by radiating energy from the collar on a collared Pokémon to any Pokémon near it, or by radiating it from the aforementioned cool control gadget at all Pokémon in range?

Regarding the name of your region: it does sound a bit on the nose, too Latin for Pokémon. Try thinking of words that are thematically linked to your whole idea and shortening them, combining them, twisting them or making vocal changes in them until you get that Pokémon feel of the name: relatively short, not directly Latin, not directly Japanese, just nice-sounding, cool gibberish.

You could try processing a Greek word that fits with your idea, they're generally less recogniseable than Latin words (that's how we got Kalos, from kallos beauty).